I’m about to go off to the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform. We are making good progress, and further fuel has been added to our fire this week, by a very useful note from the Lords Library (already referred to by Lord Norton) setting out all the evidence of the public’s opinion about reform. More detail will come in oral evidence today from Unlock Democracy, who have inspired nearly 4,000 people to write in to the Committee. So much for the public not caring about this issue.
Naturally, few rank it as of higher importance than, say, the health service or policing, and some of the detail leads to paradoxes (i.e. if you ask, “do you want this good thing” (elections) and then “do you want this other good thing” (expertise), they will answer positively to both), but the trend is very clear. Whenever the public is presented with the choice of appointment versus election, it chooses the latter.
Indeed the British Social Attitudes Survey shows an increasing number of people over the course of 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2007 who believe that the House of Lords should be all or most elected, or appointed and elected equally. By 2007, 68% agreed with one or other proposal, where only 7.2% thought that all or most Peers should be appointed. Coincidentally, it was then that MPs voted by a huge majority for a wholly or 80% elected House.
Beyond the headlines about appointment versus election, the public are optimistic about reform taking place. When asked in 2010, 60% of respondents believed there would be direct elections within ten years. In another survey in 2007, 57% wanted future members of the House of Lords to be “more independent of party politics than the House of Commons”, while only 5% thought they should represent a single constituency.
These figures are encouraging to (broad) supporters of the Draft Bill published by the Government this year, since it seeks to go forward around proposals which have been agreed cross-party, and for elections to happen in 2015. This should justify public optimism. Meanwhile, the proposals for a single, long non-renewable term, in multi-member constituencies, reflect the public’s desire for independence and their recognition that it would be inappropriate for Peers (or Senators) to compete with MPs on a single constituency basis.
We can all dismiss one poll here, or one survey there, for asking the wrong question or taking the wrong sample, but the body of evidence in the Lords research paper is clear. There is strong support for elections, and strong support for the sort of outcomes the Government has sought in its draft Bill. The public should not be ignored.
Just because the public want something it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do. That’s why we elect representatives not delegates. I wouldn’t trust ficale public opinion on this issue.
Before we look at who should be in the second chamber we first need to agree on it’s purpose. If it is to scrutinise, it needs experts-and the best way to ensure this is appointment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
In answer to Tini (good name!) wikipedia provides a useful definition, probably provided by a Norton student at some time.
However oligarchy has frequently been the form of “democracy” in earlier centuries, one residual, which we are now hoping to get rid of.
It may be a forlorn hope, if more and more
Earls who are prepared constantly to disclaim, become members of the house of commons. Their title to property is not affected; their letters patent, are.
It is unlikely that “the people” would not recognise that the other place were being taken over by the ancient ruling elite, if that were ever to occur.
Until the 1970s, and even now, the guiding hand of the ruling oligarchy is upon the
more reactionary rural constituencies, membership by proxy.
And opinion poll after opinion poll suggests that people want a long-overdue say on the European Union.
Yet you, Lord Tyler, didn’t turn up to vote in favour of holding one in 2009. And your colleagues in the Commons voted against holding one despite it being in their manifesto.
Why is that?
Chris K: that’s right, politicians like to take note of public opinion, but only when it happens to coincide with their own view.
On the old Petitions site, there was one with tens of thousands of signatures that said Gordon Brown should stand on his head and juggle ice cream. Maybe if the public were polled, they would repeatedly say they agreed with it. Yet there are very many important issues parliament should be spending its time on. Just because polls consistently say the public wants something to happen doesn’t mean there aren’t very many things they think you should be doing instead.
Membership of the EU has a much larger impact on people in this country than Lords reform, particularly all the migrants that the government can do nothing about. Today there is news of yet another measure to curb migration: limiting non-EU migrants to five years unless they can earn £35,000. Of course, this would be a drop on the ocean in terms of the number of migrants it would remove, yet certain industries will be hugely damaged. Just so the government can say it’s doing something about immigration without confronting the EU. How about polling the public on which form of migration they’d prefer you tackled?
“The public should not be ignored.”
Should I look forward to your vote in favour of an immediate referendum on Europe, the death penalty or the ECHR. Or do you really mean ‘The public should not be ignored’…when I agree with what they are saying
Either the public matters or it doesn’t you can’t pick and choose.
Fwiw I’m perfectly happy to have a referendum on Lords reform with a binary option reflecting the two camps’ positions. Better to make a clean decision that have this drag on and on and on….
While I agree with Tini’s general principle that just because the public want something doesn’t mean they should have it, but I see this issue, perhaps because I’m an American, quite differently. While I think California’s system where a constitutional amendment can be placed on the ballot by popular initiative and passed by a simple majority (with a turnout threshold, I think) is shambolic, I do think popular opinion is important on issues like this because of the principle that those who govern do so with the consent of the governed.
That said, I wonder whether the right questions have been asked. This is a low-priority debate for most people, so they are even more likely than with other areas to be (rationally) ignorant about it. When you have people supporting two contradictory results, you have to ask about it in a way that forces them to choose. So I wonder whether anyone has polled on something like, “Would you support a wholly or mostly elected House of Lords even if it meant losing the expertise that currently makes the Lords effective at scrutinising legislation?” Obviously, the experts would have to craft the question in a way that would be as fair as possible, but you get the drift.
My problem is that the lords is very effective at what it does (possibly the best model for the purpose). It appears to me to be change for changes sake. We don’t actually know what we want- apart from it to be ‘more democratic’. But I would ask what is democratic by electing more representatives, who due to the costly nature of elections are more tied to parties than voters.
I would argue that people want to feel like they have control, even if they rarely want to exert that power. The current Udin/Paul/Bhatia/Taylor/Hanningfield debacle hasn’t helped, and because the lords haven’t dealt with this effectively a massive over-reaction has ensued.
We need a method for removal, although I feel that actually this could be achieved within the current framework. We need greater transparency. And we need greater accountability. These will make the lords more democratic. Not party paid for elections, with a 50% turnout, influenced by the press.
@Rich:
Is this the kind of chaos you sense as unacceptable to the public as a whole? Because many people in the UK would feel the California ability of constitutional amendment on a ballot paper would be a great way to expand democracy in this country.
At very least the US does allow more open government in this way. The public would like a population 8 opportunity here. But, we are muffled from speaking as a group, because it is uncomfortable for government here to address and answer for what they sell the people.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgih61_how-gay-marriage-changes-california-s-constitution_news
Lord Tyler, can you confirm that the 4000 people who were “inspired…to write in to the Committee” are the same 4100 who responded to an Unlock Democracy brief survey via an online questionnaire and some street stalls? Further, the Library Note you link to made an important rider before publishing the pressure group’s survey: “…it was not carried out by a polling company and it is not clear whether sampling was used.”
Perhaps inspired isn’t quite the right word.
I also noticed you stopped quoting polls from the Note that were conducted later than 2007. Why so, if I may ask?
I am happy to have a referendum on lords reform
provided it is a multi-choice referendum, not just a yes/no vote.
I am also glad that progress is being made but if it is as much progress as that made on ATV elections, when Cameron made a complete fool out of Clegg, then it is just not worth thinking about. The LibDems lost so much faith at that time they may never recover especially,if they do the same again, with their own pet reform bills.
All legislation-empowered-or-influencing members of the Legislature, Judiciary, Senior-Civil-Service, and Colleges of Excellence,
should be both (a) pre-selected & (b) democratically elected by The People, on the basis of both the Lifeplace and the Workplace experience, knowledge, and know-how of each candidate and not on any basis of Party.
Comprehensive lists of Experts should be compiled, showing each possible-candidate’s history, both of successes and failures, in lifeplaces (the Lifeplace) and in workplaces (the Workplace);
and these long lists should be always freely accessible to, and participatively
scrutinisable by The Public;
and need to be be cooperatively and successively shortlisted by People & Administrative-Governance;
the final shortlist being presented to The People for choices at the ballot-box in a major Election.
In the form of sequential democracy that is government-by-the-people (“by” first and foremost, sine-qua-non) then for the people, and of the people;
as distinct from sequentially:
govt-of, -for, -by;
govt-for, -of, -by;
or other sequence than primarily “govt-by”, as the first priority.
Possibly most vitally, since The People become, if only for the duration of the ballot-paper, the primary sovereign demo-cratic power,
lifelong-training of every level of The People in skills of Information-Sharing; Obscurity-or-Weakness-Scrutiny; and in Cooperative-Thinking, Discussion, & Problem-Solving.
———-
In short;
1. Publish lists of the Lifeplace & Workplace abilities and suitabilities of all possible-candidates; in which initially at least personal-identity by name, address, photograph or other such personal-id should not be published, in the interest of primary fitness-for-purpose (of the prospective Job).
2. Make shortlisting a two-way cooperative process between the Administration and The People.
3. Probably most important of all is the Need of our progressive-democracy for easily and affordably accessible 24/7/52/5/100 democratic-governance-training programmes, primarily and dominantly in and for the democratic Lifeplace and not for the directive Workplace*
(* Dictionary: All workplaces are Directive, even when any of them have a ‘democratic-participation’ avenue such as “at least one shop-floor worker on the Board”.
————
It is not being made clear, and one has to conclude that this is deliberate ‘mushroom-treatment’ of The People, by the Establishment & Government, that “election” of House of Lords (qua Upper-House, or Senate) members is intended by the British & International Governance-Class to be “by existing members of Parliament and their hidden-backers only” –
and NOT executively-inclusively by The People.
Looking through the Committee membership,
if I admit to having been acquainted with Laura Sandys when she was a 15 year old, at hot dinners, it might give away the turn of my coat in the early 90s, deprecating myself as I may be.
I wonder how Mr Thurso is reacting to the proposed reforms as a former liberal Earl.